Tony Blair and his 'greedy' wife are laughing all the way to the bank

By GEOFFREY LEVY

Last updated at 13:34 11 January 2008

So now we know it was no idle dream that took Cherie Blair to look over Winslow Hall, the masterpiece £3million Buckinghamshire mansion on 22 acres designed by Sir Christopher Wren, after which she took Tony to see it.

They didn't buy it - but then, perhaps the former Labour leader and his wife are looking for something even grander.

Some men leave the highest public offices and devote their lives to helping others. Tony Blair, aided and abetted by his greedy wife, is making copious arrangements to help himself.

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There is, of course, no reason why a former prime minister shouldn't profit from his experience and knowledge - Margaret Thatcher certainly did so with speaking engagements on both sides of the Atlantic and her memoirs.

Yet it is the unseemly haste with which Blair has opened for business when he has hardly unpacked after leaving Downing Street that leaves such a sour note.

All the apparent ease with which the Blairs have been buying property fell into place yesterday as it emerged that Tony, who left 10 Downing Street in July, is becoming a part-time adviser to the Wall Street bank JP Morgan on an estimated £1million a year.

And this only the first of "a small handful" of similar advisory positions. His earning capacity is estimated to be in the tens of millions.

No wonder Blair's new personal stationery exudes such bold confidence, headed simply "The Office of Tony Blair" and thickly underscored to emphasise his significance.

Clearly some big decisions were made after their holiday cruise on French luxury goods tycoon Bernard Arnaud's sumptuous yacht last summer.

The Blairs are understood to have spent what remained of the summer working out how they could maximise the benefits of his ten years in power.

They needed money - and fast - to ease the problems of paying some £20,000 a month on an estimated £5million mortgages on their five properties.

Friends say Cherie was "in despair" when Tony decided to put on hold his massive earning potential and instead set about rehabilitating his tattered post-Iraq reputation by accepting the unpaid position of Middle East peace negotiator.

They suffered a further financial blow when Gordon Brown did not go ahead, as had been expected, with a snap election.

Cherie had returned from New York after speaking engagements (at £15,000-30,000 a time) with her head filled with literary agents' advice that the sooner Blair's political memoirs were published, the bigger they would be.

Blair has a £5million deal with Random House, but he could hardly bring them out this side of a general election because they would have to include in graphic detail his bitter differences and turbulent relationship with his Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown.

To publish would have been seen as an act of treachery against the party he led for 13 years.

But there was no such moral restriction on milking his celebrity on the American lecture circuit, and he has been charging up to £100,000 per lecture addressing audiences who, as his agent has admitted, expect to hear him talk about Iraq.

One recent month he earned almost £500,000 and the bookings stretch ahead.

Many will find it thoroughly distasteful that Blair is now making millions out of talking to bloated after-dinner audiences about the war, especially at a time when the care and treatment of our wounded

Iraq and Afghanistan heroes has been under severe question.

But the fact is the crushing burden of his mortgages is suddenly hardly a problem at all - small beer to a man now destined to become the richest ex-prime minister in history.

Builders have now finished at the Blair's £4million 19th century Georgian mansion in London's Connaught Square, with its five floors and Gothic-style fireplaces, to which has been linked an £800,000 mews cottage they bought later.

There are also the two flats in Bristol which Cherie bought with the questionable help of conman Peter Foster, the former lover of her one-time private guru Carole Caplin (he is currently serving four years in jail in Australia for money-laundering).

And they still have their old Sedgefield constituency house in Trimdon, County Durham, which is now the HQ of the new Tony Blair Sports Foundation.

For the moment, Tony's earning time is limited. He spends around two weeks each month living in a suite in the glamorous American Colonel Hotel in East Jerusalem, where the peace mission he leads on behalf of America, Russia, the EU and the UN takes up an entire floor.

Another week he spends travelling on business and lecturing in the U.S., and the fourth week in London. "Cherie hates being without Tony for weeks on end," says one of their oldest political friends.

"She especially hates being out of the limelight. Even though the stresses of his being PM are behind them, they actually look quite miserable."

Yet Cherie is said to be "noticeably calmer" about money now that her husband is finding time to gather in some serious fees. "It's she who wants a country house,' says one of his oldest New Labour colleagues.

"I'm sure Tony'd have been happy enough if they'd gone back to live in Islington when they left Downing Street but Cherie wanted to live somewhere special.

"She got the taste for a large country house with Chequers, and she's missing it."

Cherie is also adding liberally to the family coffers. In addition to her own transatlantic speaking engagements she first made, astonishingly, while her husband was still prime minister, she has plunged back into her lucrative work at Matrix, the legal chambers she helped found specialising in human rights.

At around the time Blair became prime minister and she was forced to scale down her workload she was understood to be earning in the region of £250,000 a year.

Now she has reclaimed her old office at Matrix. Leading barristers' earnings have soared in recent years and top QCs can now make more than £1million a year.

And, of course, there is the little matter of her own memoirs, for which she has done a £1.5million deal.

Unimaginatively titled The Autobiography, it is ironic that her testament of a dedicated socialist life is being written in the high- ceilinged grandeur of their £4million London mansion.

She is writing with surprising speed and has already completed 150 typed pages. The deal with publishers Little, Brown decrees it will be published next October, in time to catch the Labour Party conference.

This will maximise attention, and therefore sales, because one man who is bound to figure prominently in the later chapters is Gordon Brown. She is said to "hate Brown for hounding her husband from office".

The tantalising question, therefore, is: will she explode her bomb or hold back? One long-standing New Labour figure has no doubts.

"Cherie is incredibly venomous towards Gordon and it's bound to come out in the book," he says.

Pointedly, a spokesman for Tony Blair says he is "not helping Cherie with her memoir."